Alive Garden Party Australia: Brothers in Rhythm co-founder Steve Anderson reveals what to expect

A series of club anthems will blast from one of the Perth CBD’s eastern-most points next Saturday — but this is no regular weekend music festival.

Tunes from artists including Daft Punk, the Chemical Brothers and Eric Prdyz will be reimagined as full symphonic hits for Club Symphony, part of the Alive Garden Party coming to Ozone Arena in East Perth.

The brainchild of Brothers in Rhythm — themselves a chart act of the 1990s but now best known as collaborators with megastars including Kylie Minogue and Janet Jackson — the event promises to transport revellers back to the big dance clubs of the era, but with an incredible twist.

“It’s massive kick drums, it’s massive basses — massive,” Brothers in Rhythm founder Steve Anderson told The Sunday Times. “We take the records, we recreate the records and then we add the orchestra on top.

“So it’s basically heightening the euphoria of the original by actually supersizing it.”

Alive Garden Party has five dates in Australia, starting in Melbourne on Saturday, with NSW to follow Perth, and Adelaide and Brisbane in the new year. Anderson said a similar show in the UK earlier this month had “10,000 people absolutely nuts”.

It also features vocals from Paulini and The Potbelleez.

“People are dancing, people are euphoric. They’re quite overwhelmed by it in places,” he said. “And I think doing it in the type [of] venues that we’re lucky enough to do in Australia — outdoors at an evening, sun setting, with these incredible visuals — it’s just going to be such an incredibly brilliant kind of experience.”

Anderson himself will be seeing a lot of Australia over the coming months. He’s also a long-term collaborator with Minogue — including on some of her 90s tracks now recognised as some of her finest, such as Confide In Me and Where is the Feeling — and will be part of her upcoming Tension world tour, which kicks off in Perth in February.

Minogue hinted in interviews that she wanted to highlight some of her extensive back-catalogue in the tour, including a 10-minute remix of Confide In Me. While not being drawn on anything in the upcoming Tension tour, Anderson said Australia more than anywhere else appreciated Minogue’s 1990s-era, which had been rediscovered by fans.

“I think as people have come to be fans of hers, they’ve gone back and (listened) and found it’s genuinely quite extraordinary,” he said of the Impossible Princess album, released in 1997. “The writing on it, specifically her writing on it, is beautifully artistic.

“She had to make that record to then be able to move forward to the next one (Light Years, with Spinning Around as the major comeback hit).

“So you know, it’s a very important part of her career and it would be lovely to honour it in some way.”

Via Brothers in Rhythm, Anderson and founding collaborator Dave Seaman owe their break to Chris Lowe from the Pet Shop Boys appreciating work they had done. Recalling their 1990s success, he says it seems incredible now, in an era of Spotify, digital remixes and everything being available online, to consider how they used to do their work — including remixing some of Michael Jackson’s tracks which were kept “under lock and key”.

“I think we had that ability to be able to deliver a record that would work on the dance floor, but also work on the radio and then that meant we could work with the types of artists . . .like David Bowie, Sting, people just seemed to trust that because we knew we would deliver it with respect,” he said.

“Now with technology it’s so easy to just punch in a BPM (beats per minute) and go ‘I want it to be at that speed’ and it does it for you, but back then, the actual process to speed up a vocal — like that just took so long to actually even prepare.”

Alive Garden Party tickets are on sale now